General Relativity - Feb/March 2011

Jan de Boer

First class: Monday January 31st

Last class: Thursday March 17

Question session: TBA

Written Exam: Thursday March 24, 09.30-12.30, A1.10

lecture times: 10.00-12.00

exercises: 12.00-13.00

TA: Ricardo Caldeira Costa (r.n.caldeira-costa[at]uva.nl)

room: A1.10 (Monday), F1.02 (Thursday)

credits: 6EC


This course consists of a basic introduction to general relativity. The course will more or less follow the book Sean Carroll, Spacetime and Geometry (Pearson, 2003). A shorter version of the book, without exercises, are the lecture notes by Sean Carroll, which can be obtained for free from his website (click here). Below I will probably keep track of the topics covered each week, so that you can see where we stand in the class. There are many books about general relativity, and there is an astonishing amount of material available on the web, so it shouldn't be too hard to find additional background material. Two books worth mentioning are The course will contain various exercises. We will discuss these in class. Once every three weeks or so a set of exercises will be given which should be handed in. They will be graded, and completing these successfully can yield an upgrade of final mark on the written exam. Final grade = max(final,(2*final+homework)/3).